Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Only because it is Liberty Counsel

To make a short story long, I am not qualified to write about Planned Parenthood and its travails. I simply have not followed the details in the same way that I am attuned to LGBT and anti-LGBT events. Sure, I am pro-choice but I don't like abortion. If I had a 14-year-old daughter who got knocked up I would like to know that one good option is to terminate the pregnancy. I also recognize that there is a considerable overlap of anti-choice and anti-gay activists. They are pretty much the same religious fanatics including the Vatican. They are our quaint villagers with torches.

One of those merry little bands of religious fanatics is Liberty Counsel which is also designated an anti-gay hate group by the good people at SPLC. Its leader, Mat Staver, is in permanent pissed-off mode.

Liberty Counsel is representing Sandra Merritt who was indicted by the Harris County grand jury that was investigating Planned Parenthood. I received a press release and one paragraph amused me (I did tell you that I was making a short story long):

Mat Staver made the following statement: “It
is disturbing that Sandra Merritt was indicted for exercising a
journalistic investigation of Planned Parenthood. She did nothing
wrong. We look forward to her day in court.”

The very idea that these people (Ms. Merritt and David Daleiden) are journalists is ludicrous. They are not even bloggers and they are certainly not investigators. They started with the conclusion that Planned Parenthood engages in illegal activity. Then, by editing video footage, they attempted to demonstrate the foregone conclusion. They didn't do it very well. The 11 states, thus far, that investigated this matter have cleared Planned Parenthood. When FactCheck obtained an unedited video, it proved just the opposite of what these imbeciles claimed.

Asserting that Ms. Merritt did nothing wrong is equally absurd. She forged a government document for the purpose of defrauding Planned Parenthood. That is a felony with serious potential consequences. Her criminal activity did not end there. She engaged in a conspiracy to frame Planned Parenthood for illegal acts. That, too, is a felony for which she has not been indicted. It is currently the subject of a civil suit in San Francisco.

When Staver speaks of her day in court he means it literally. The prospects for Merritt to negotiate a favorable plea deal are substantially diminished because Staver likes trials. Liberty Counsel usually loses in court but a trial is a guaranteed donation magnet.

Staver will attempt to make this about abortion. This case has nothing to do with abortion. In any event we are about to learn more: